Join Brian, Mike, Dirk and Chewie as they discuss all things Magic: The Gathering. Since there are plenty of tournament and strategy podcasts out there, we've decided to focus on the fun of the game in all its many forms, from Prereleases to multiplayer free-for-alls to whatever else we can come up with. Give us a listen!

On this episode, of course we're gonna talk about From the Vault: Twenty. I mean, duh. Then we go on into more esoteric topics. A listener known as Andrew Hunt (Magnor Criol on the forums) supplied us with six 60-card casual decks to talk about. And we do. At great length. These are really pretty cool. We go over each one, poking at the pros and cons, bouncing potential modifications off of each other, stuff like that. The links to the TappedOut pages are below.

Then we have a slight interruption. Jeremey Schofield (@J_Schofield) pops in to try to get money out of you! Not for himself, but for Chewie! Jeremey has spearheaded an operation to get Chewie a plane ticket to Grand Prix Las Vegas in June. If you remember, GP Vegas is going to be Modern Masters Limited, which is most likely going to be completely amazing. The GP itself is shaping up to be one of the biggest ever. So if you'd like to chip in and help, all you have to do is click here: http://www.gofundme.com/2309p0

*Chewie note: By the time this was ready to be posted, we had already reached the goal of $500! But if you still want to send in more, go right ahead. Any excess funds will be split between beefing up the prize pool for the raffle-type thing he's doing and the rest will be donated to the MTGCast Network to keep it up and running. Pretty cool huh?

Here are the decks in the order that we talked about them, feel free to follow along:

Wow, we talked about a LOT of stuff this week. We handled lots of it in quickfire, lightning-round fashion and you can find the links for those down there after these paragraphs. Doing the live episode from the Prerelease and having Prillaman on one week means we missed a fair amount of news. So even though it's not really news anymore, we still decided to weigh in with our opinions. Yay opinions!

What does YOUR favorite guild-flavored floss taste like?

The main topic, however, is something new. Yes, after more than five years of podcasting about Magic, Brian has managed to come up with something we've never talked about before. We're all very proud of him.

I suppose I should tell you what that is. There are a lot of cycles in Gatecrash. Hey, there are a lot of cycles in every Magic set. But outside of those cycles, there are a lot of really cool cards that stand alone. Well this episode, we decided to take a look at those noncycled (uncyclic?) cards and imagine what they would look like as part of a cycle. From Giant Vacuum to...well I'm sure we named some more, we made up some cycles that just seemed to work. Or that sounded like fun. Or that were completely ridiculous. Whatever it was, we were all over it. And it led to some fun and interesting discussions too, so we hope you guys enjoy it!

We're joined this episode by none other than Bryan Prillaman, one of our favorite dorks. You know, the mossy guy formerly on Avant-Card Show and now JudgeCast. We really love that guy. And our own Brian got sick and died, so we had to find a replacement at the last minute. And since it was last minute, this episode is all over the place. We did cover a few important things though, so let's list those:

Yes you read that correctly! The dorks venture forth into the long dark of Lucky's Card Shop in Greensboro NC to bring you field reports straight from the Prerelease! Actually it's quite well-lit in there, but that wouldn't have sounded anywhere near as cool. But yes, Chewie brought his Tascam DR-08 recorder with him to catalogue everything we did while we were there. Well, maybe not everything. I mean, he didn't take it to the bathroom or to McDonald's with him. Okay he did, but he didn't use it at those two places.

Anyway, Prerelease. With a Simic, an Orzhov, and two Boros players in our crew, somebody was probably going to do well. And they did, but you'll have to listen to find out who and how good. Or just, you know, pay attention to the forums and Twitter and stuff. Whatever. We discussed how rounds went, talked to other players, got a few good stories, and had an all-around good time. So give it a listen and let us know what you think, since this is the first time we've done this.